Decent font rendering in Java - at last!
To be fair, this is hardly news. There has been a lot of work with font rendering in Mustang (Java 1.6.0) and with Sun releasing weekly builds, people have been able to test this for months.
Today was the first day for me though. No one could deny that fonts in Java looked poor (relative to other GUI libs, at least). It was possible to turn on anti-aliasing, which helped, but then they sometimes looked a little fuzzy, especially for smaller sizes. Anyway, here’s the current situation.
 |
 |
 |
| JRE 1.5.0 (default) | JRE 1.5.0 (with AA) | Mustang b61 (default) |
I was very pleased to see the display in Mustang looking great - as they should be! Now, Mustang also supports subpixel anti-aliasing for improved rendering on LCD screens. What I’ve yet to establish is whether it was on for the above screenshots. They look pretty good, so it could be the case.